National Poetry Month: “Have You Ever Tried To Hide?”

The iconic feminist poet Pat Parker was known not only for her printed work but also for her powerful performances. Parker’s activism with the Black Panther Party and the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council in the 1960s shaped her poetic voice. Her poetry, rooted in the African American oral tradition of call and response, grapples with the complex intersections of the personal and the political for African American women, often asking black men and white women to examine their own privilege.

In 1972, Parker joined the vibrant Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, Calif., which republished Child of Myself and printed her next book, Pit Stop (1973). Both books had to be reprinted due to great demand. In 1976, Pat Parker and Judy Grahn made the only spoken-word album for the feminist label Olivia Records, Where Would I Be Without You?, a recording of their readings. Parker published two more poetry collections, Movement in Black (1978) and Jonestown & Other Madness (1985) before she died in 1989 from cancer.

In the two poems below, Parker takes epigraphs from African American figures–one unattributed and the other from Harriet Tubman–and expands on them with her trademark performative and poetic panache.

Parker revised both of these poems extensively for her later volumes, but I present them here as feminists would have encountered them in print during the 1970s.

Thank you, Anastasia! Your mother’s work is a monument to black women, women in general, and society as a whole! Such richness of mind, insight, and experiences will forever be a call to our spirits to reach higher!
Ase`~ Maferefun, ancestor Pat Parker!